


Astralis

by Fionavar



Series: The Silence [2]
Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game)
Genre: Established Relationship, Family, Fluff, Gen, as much as Harper will allow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-18
Updated: 2020-07-18
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:07:22
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,887
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25280602
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fionavar/pseuds/Fionavar
Summary: Stargazing in Hlath.
Relationships: Taliesin Harper | Taliesin Ferryman/Cort Raghnall
Series: The Silence [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1912249
Comments: 3
Kudos: 2
Collections: Alternative Ethics





	Astralis

**Author's Note:**

  * For [codenamecynic](https://archiveofourown.org/users/codenamecynic/gifts).



> Happy birthday, Cynic! I tried to write Taliesin some unalloyed happiness, but it turns out he kind of sucks at it. I hope you enjoy anyway.

The night is perfect, as summer nights in Hlath can be – just enough breeze off the waves to sweeten the day’s warmth into comfortable coolness, the sea quietly flirting with the shore, and countless stars scattered across the clear sky. Taliesin knows the stars that matter, as all sailors do – too well to look at them for anything more than direction, usually – but tonight he gazes up at them from a blanket spread on the sand.

They are distant, irrelevant, uncaring, as always: no more foretellers of destiny than they are witnesses to the chaos and mistakes of his stupid life, but they _are_ beautiful.

“Not as pretty as you,” Taliesin says, the thought tossed into the silence as though it’s perfectly self-explanatory.

“Do you mean that I’m prettier than Cort, or that he’s prettier than me?” Celeste asks gravely, wriggling slightly against his side as she considers this important question. “Because I think his blue eyes are prettier than boring grey ones, but my hair is _definitely_ nicer.”

“I like grey eyes,” Cort says, solid and radiating warmth into Taliesin’s side. His hand closes over Taliesin’s.

“Really?” Taliesin asks, willing as ever to push a little harder, even in response to a compliment, even when the point doesn’t matter in the least. “What do you like about them?”

Cort considers this. “They’re… expressive,” he says finally, with a glide of his thumb across Taliesin’s palm that turns the words into something as suggestive as either of them will ever permit in front of Celeste. “Although I suppose that might be less a question of colour than the individuals who have them.”

“Saying you like them because of something they might not be isn’t a good answer,” Celeste tells him. “Margaret talks about how they pick up a bit of colour from everything around me, so it’s like they’re always changing. I don’t think she’s right, but it’s a better answer than yours.”

Taliesin feels Cort nod, rather than seeing it. “That will do, then. I like grey eyes because they are changeable and reflect what’s around them.”

Celeste seems happier with this than Taliesin is, his mind readily shaping it into how he wears and abandons selves the way others do shirts, whatever suits those around him, and how the colour wouldn’t matter if only they weren’t the same as -

\- he hauls himself back from that precipice, if narrowly. They are having a lovely peaceful evening, the three of them stargazing in Hlath, and Celeste deserves better from her brother than to have him start gnawing his own innards at this precise moment. “Grey eyes aside,” he says, “I meant that the _stars_ aren’t as pretty as you. Both of you.”

Celeste snuggles in closer to him, putting her head on his arm. “You’re pretty, too,” she tells him. “Just like… that one there.” Her pointing finger is a dark blot that covers a hundred stars and could be indicating half a dozen more, but probably she means Balien, a reddish and wandering star. You don’t set your course by Balien, but you have to recognise it so you don’t confuse it with its brother Anados – fainter, but more fixed in the eastern sky.

“Balien,” Cort names it for her. “I’m told that if you whisper your troubles to Balien, it will take them away with it when it goes wandering. Usually it loses them somewhere below the horizon.”

This seems uncommonly sentimental for Cort. “Who told you that?”

Cort shrugs one shoulder against Taliesin’s. “Rix. I caught him at it one watch.”

Taliesin laughs, warmed by the idea of his boy cherishing such a superstition and being unafraid to admit it to Cort.

“I like that,” Celeste says. “I’m going to remember it for later.”

“No troubles now, Celie?” Taliesin asks.

“Nope,” she says cheerfully. “I’m here with you, and the stars are pretty.”

“But, as previously stated, not as pretty as either of you.” Taliesin turns his head, kisses the top of her hair. His gaze drifts to Evandor, as every sailor’s does eventually. The star stands, bright and unyielding in the northern sky, the first reference point and the last. Valkur’s gift to sailors, some say, but Taliesin’s association with it has always been less exalted and more personal.

He squeezes Cort’s hand.

“Do you know any more stories about them?” Celeste asks.

Taliesin tries to remember. The stars are mostly plain navigational facts, but there’s something about two goddesses fighting over the moon, leaving dark scars and spilling the moonlight that trails after it. The details are vague, but he can do better than that anyway.

“Not many about the stars,” he begins, “but see Selûne, there?” The silver crescent hangs low above the horizon, nine points of light amid a sea of stardust following it down into the dark, restless sea. “Once upon a time, she lived in a town by the sea. There she wove ribbons so beautiful that -”

“No,” Celeste interrupts, poking him in the ribs. “I don’t want to be the moon, Taliesin.”

“I only just started!” he protests. “There was going to be a bit about how you wove the winds into a ribbon and someone stole it, and a noble quest to get it back, and how the Tears of Selûne flutter out from your basket.”

“And probably some wretched pun on your name and the word ‘celestial’,” Cort says.

“I would _never_.” Not in the first half, anyway. “Fine, you do better. Tell a story about a star.” It’s not addressed to either of them particularly, and he’s not surprised when Celeste takes up the challenge herself.

“That one,” she says without hesitation, pointing again – probably at the green gleam of Coliar, which isn’t a star at all but their nearest sunward neighbour, and not much use except to confirm time-readings. “She’s the lonely star,” Celeste says. “Um… Lythe.”

Taliesin can _hear_ Cort opening his mouth to correct her, and he elbows him.

“For the longest time, none of the other stars would talk to her. They said among themselves that she didn’t sparkle right, but that was just jealousy. She had two things that neither of the rest of them did.” Celeste pauses, either to draw out the tension – he’s heard her weave stories for her customers before, she has a talent for it – or because she hasn’t decided what those two things are yet. “One was her colour,” she says eventually. “There are other green stars in the sky, of course, but not quite like her. Some are green because they’re mouldy, or because they’re magic, but Lythe is green because of all her apple trees. The leaves are green, and so is the light of the apples. There’s no sunlight for Lythe, so the apples have to glow so that the birds can see.”

“Makes sense,” Taliesin agrees, a hard and not unpleasant ache in his chest at her words, at the pretty nonsense spun so fearlessly. It just might be the only good thing his worthless prick of a father has ever done, he thinks: he exiled Celeste to people who could give her a childhood free of the shadows in his. Who could raise her to be sweet, and funny, and serious, and loving, and so different to everything he was at fourteen.

Here and now, under the stars with the two people he loves most in all the world, the thought is almost without bitterness.

“None of the other stars have apples,” Celeste continues, “nothing but sprouts that never ripen. A few of them even tried to steal some, but the birds pecked them. The other reason they were jealous was because of her voice. Lythe is the most beautiful singer in the sky,” she tells them, “even when she’s singing alone, but most of the time her birds sing with her. So she didn’t really mind being alone, because her birds kept her company and she had to keep the apples glowing. But then, one night, a new comet came to visit. Mavo had come a very long way to see if Lythe’s orchards were just as beautiful as she’d been told. And because they were, and because she liked listening to Lythe sing too much to be jealous, she did something that none of the other stars ever had.”

That is definitely a dramatic pause, and Taliesin grins at her. She doesn’t see, eyes fixed firmly on her inspiration.

“She _asked_ Lythe for an apple.”

Cort is very still beside Taliesin, perhaps remembering another apple.

“ ‘I can’t stay very long,” Mavo said, “and it will be a long time before I come back. I’ve got a long way to go across the sky, and for most of it I’m alone. If you could spare me an apple, it’ll remind me of your beautiful singing.’

“Lythe smiled. ‘For a friend,’ she told Mavo, ‘I can spare an entire tree.’ And she had a quiet word with her birds, and twelve of them said they’d stay with that tree and keep Mavo company while she was travelling. So she went and Lythe stayed, but one day her friend will be back, and then they’ll sing together again.”

“That’s lovely, Celie,” and it really is.

“I know,” she says, and flashes a grin at him in the darkness. “It’s Cort’s turn now.”

“I told you about Balien,” he says mildly, “while Taliesin has only tried to talk about the moon.”

“She’s right,” Taliesin says, as much to support Celeste as to needle Cort – for all his virtues, for how dizzyingly in love with the man he has always been, Cort is generally not a willing or able storyteller.

“Hmph. Fine.” Cort is silent long enough to suggest he might back out, but it’s probably just his usual careful consideration of every word. “Those two northeast of the moon. Doros and Gurben.” Twin stars, Taliesin knows, and hidden in Selûne’s light most of the year; useful for estimating tides, sometimes. “They were trained all their lives to fight each other. Now, on the battlefield, they circle each other endlessly. Maybe they’re both too cautious to strike first. Maybe they don’t want to close because once the fight is over, the survivor has done all he was ever meant to do. They were trained to fight, not to have a life afterwards. Nobody’s really sure.”

“Maybe,” Celeste says thoughtfully, “it isn’t a fight at all. Maybe they arrived on the battlefield and saw the one person their life was always about, one way or another, and decided to love each other instead of fighting. Maybe they’re dancing.”

“Maybe,” Cort concedes, and falls silent.

And that aches in a different way, one Taliesin does not let himself dwell on. Instead he points out the _elianthus_ to Celeste, the shark constellation both he and Cort wear as tattoos, for which his ship is named. He makes up some tall tales about it and how many other stars it has eaten, and Celeste embroiders the story, and by the time she starts yawning… well, by then the past is loosened and the future is unwritten, and there is only the three of them in a present that might as well be endless. He is happy, and knows it, and the night is, after all, perfect.


End file.
